Content Strategy Approach

Content strategy isn't a silver bullet. If all your content needed was a cookie cutter strategic framework on top of it, you wouldn't be on this website right now.

Content strategy is, by nature, an iterative process. It's not suddenly discovered; it's refined over and over again. This takes calculation, discipline, and patience.

My approach to content strategy is based on four, broad principles that let the content and those who consume it guide the strategy. Don't believe all the best practice listicles fighting over page one. When it comes to content, the only best practice is what works for your audience.

TAGGING

Building a content strategy begins with properly tagging your content. 

This means inventorying what you do and don't have, auditing what does and doesn't work, and determining what are and aren't your goals. With this data, you can develop a taxonomy that demonstrates how well your content supports your marketing and business objectives.

TRACKING

When measuring your content against your tags, it's important to track content metrics, not channel metrics.

As a general rule, this means total metrics rather than uniques (e.g. total clicks, not unique clicks). Uniques speak to how engaged your audience is on a given channel, but totals tell you how much they loved what engaged them.

It also means consumption metrics, not conversions. Great content doesn't convert; consumed content converts.

TESTING

When tracking content with the proper metrics, verifying trends will be impossible without understanding where you should and shouldn't test content.

Content trends can be identified anywhere, but they are best tested on owned media, even for different channels. A good content strategy is built on content proven to resonate with your ideal audience. And you need a sandbox environment to do that.

This doesn't mean content strategy ignores channel strategy. Channel testing is necessary to determine the unique style and delivery required for each channel. Content testing is a similarly distinct discipline. The difference is the learnings can be adapted across channels to fit their unique styles.

TIME

When testing content to verify trends, remember you can't rush results.

The most critical ingredient to any content strategy is time. Proper tagging, tracking, and testing take more time than you'd expect and more time than many will want.

First, you need to define a taxonomy that you think represents how your audience perceives your content. Then, you need to compare those taxonomic terms across multiple channels with varying levels of noise. Finally, you need to determine if any of the results are statistically significant. Because what good is a content strategy that isn't actionable?

Some results will be clearer than others, like content types (copy, images, videos, etc.). But others, like topics, tend to be more subjective. Audiences often have this annoying habit of completely ignoring our categories in favor of their own reasons for consumption.

Thus, a good content strategy adapts over time as it learns the language of its audience.

Odds are your first set of tags won't be your last, and you will likely never land on the perfect taxonomy. That's ok, because that was never the assignment. All you need to do is find a strategy that moves your audience.

It doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to work.